How I Learned To Hate Hiking
by Baeraad
Summary: Catherine knew from the start that letting her brother talk her into going on a weekend hunting trip was a bad idea, but as usual, her pessimism proved... insufficient.
1. Chapter 1

I was 7000 words into this thing when I realised that there was absolutely no way I'd be able to wrap this up in just one normal-sized instalment. I'd spent most of my time setting the mood and establishing the characters – anything I did to finish it quickly would be a huge anticlimax.

As such, this is the first chapter of the very first multi-chapter Catherine Faller story. A historic occasion? Doubtful…

Hope you enjoy it, either way. The continuation will follow.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 17:_

_I effing hate nature._

_I hate the bugs. I hate the plants that you get your legs tangled in. I hate the mud, and the branches that rip your face, and the way the pollen in the air makes your throat go thick._

_And above all, I hate the sheer pointlessness of it. Every tree grows where it does for no better reason than that that was where the seed dropped, and it's the shape it is because, well, that was how it turned out. Nothing has meaning. Nothing has significance._

_Now, how come other people don't feel that way? Oh, there's people who like cities, I suppose. But as far as I'm concerned, they like it in the wrong way. They enjoy the instant gratification of television and open-around-the-clock drugstores. And they enjoy the fact that something is always happening in a city, which means that there is always some distraction that they can use as an excuse to never stop and think, just to drift along and take in experiences without ever processing them._

_Why is deep, careful, philosophical thinking always associated with nature? Cities, after all, are the product of intelligence, whereas nature is just what you call those parts of the world that intelligence hasn't bothered to do anything sensible with yet. Why does no one write poetry about buildings, only about forests? Why is it romantic to give someone a rose, and tacky to give them a pocket calculator?_

_This is a bothersome line of thought, because I know that there is a race of Anomalies who would applaud this line of thinking…_

---

Catherine looked at Rick's friends. Rick's friends looked at Catherine. Neither side found the sight especially concerting.

Rick had three friends who had found the time to join him for this hunting trip. There was Harold Pointdexter, who was big, fat and morose, his wife Deborah, who was big, fat and cheerful, and Mel Holmes, who had a stupid black moustache and looked greasy even though he really wasn't. All three of them were carrying rifles and backpacks with a great deal of familiarity, and wore bright orange don't-shoot-me-I'm-not-a-moose jackets. Catherine immediately hated all three of them. Not because there was anything particularly hateful about them (well, except possibly the moustache) but because she tended to hate everyone she met. It saved time; they were just going to prove to be morons anyway.

The hunting trio, on the other hand, found themselves watching a tall, gaunt woman with long black hair, a long black coat that billowed around her as she moved and brought the thought, unpleasantly, to great, dark wings. Her pale face was locked in an expression that promised war to anyone involved in dragging her out here, and yes, people, that _does_ mean you - I know it was all Rick's idea and you'd rather not have me here, but you're guilty by association. Deal with it.

"I'm sure you'll get along fine," said Rick Faller desperately, in direct denial of the evidence. He had just finished introducing everyone, and he looked like he wasn't as sure that this was a good idea as he had been when he had nagged his sister into agreeing with it.

Deborah gave Catherine a friendly grin, though it looked a little ragged around the edges. Catherine's scowl ate friendly grins alive.

"This is your first time hunting, sweetie?" she said.

Catherine considered the irony of that question for just long enough to make everyone uncomfortable.

"First time I've hunted deer," she then offered. Her normal choice of prey was of a somewhat more grotesque nature. It tended to walk on two legs, for starters. Or at least shamble.

"Well, you can ask me if you want any pointers," Mel said. His smile was greasy too, Catherine thought. "I've done this since I was a kid."

"Uh-huh," Catherine said. "If I feel especially stupid, I'll be sure to accept your help."

Mel's smile grew a bit more uncertain. He was smart enough to recognise the double meaning. It wasn't that hard, anyway. Catherine's entire body language radiated sarcasm.

"Cathy, can I talk to you for a second?" Rick said hurriedly. He smiled nervously at his friends. "You start up the trail, why don't you? We'll catch up."

The three hunters set off over the meadow separating the patch of road where the cars were parked from the forest proper.

"I know, I know," Catherine said once they were out of hearing range. "I'm no _good_ at being sociable, okay?"

Rick sighed.

"I know, but couldn't you at least try?" he said. "These are my friends. They're not bad people, you know."

"That Mel guy keeps giving me you-know-you-want-it leers," Catherine complained.

"Yeah, I think his face is permanently locked in one of those," Rick said. "He doesn't mean anything by it, I promise."

"Well, I don't like him," Catherine said. "And I don't like being miles away from the closest pavement, and I don't understand why you're even making me carry a rifle, because I'm _definitely_ not shooting any poor innocent animal just so you can have venison for dinner."

Rick gave her a kicked-puppy look, and Catherine started to feel a small, whimpering sensation inside. It was very familiar to her. It was the feeling of having pushed the 'cranky bitch' routine too far.

"I just wanted you to, you know, get away from… stuff… for a few days…" he said miserably.

"I know. I know." Catherine sighed. She knew what it was he wanted her to get away from. It wasn't like she could blame him, either.

The thing was this; she had been walking down the street one day, and something had clicked in her brain, and she had become aware that some of the people around her weren't people. Or at least not people in the traditional sense. Some of them were technically human, except that they were dead humans. Some of them were half human, half _something else_. And some of them were _something else _to one hundred percent, so alien that she didn't even know what to call them.

It seemed that someone needed to do something about it all. And while there were other people than Catherine who could see the Anomalies, those other people were uniformly idiots, which was natural enough, since most people other than Catherine were uniformly idiots. So if someone were to study the Anomalies, classify them, find scientifically explanations for them and bring them to the attention of the scientific community, well… that would have to be her, she supposed.

Rick didn't know all this, of course. He didn't _want_ to know - he believed, probably very correctly, that knowing more than necessary it would complicate his blissfully uncomplicated life beyond repair. All he knew was that his little sister was involved in something pretty big and bad.

It must be very tempting for him to want to protect Catherine from the dangerous stuff she was mixed up in, even if it was only for a weekend. And she really shouldn't resent it.

_But couldn't he have sent me to one of those luxurious spas or something?_

"I'll try, okay?" she said. "I won't bite anyone's head off even if I think they're really asking for it. But I'm not shooting any deer, okay?"

"Fair enough," Rick said with a grateful smile. "Uh… there's one more thing, though…"

Catherine winced.

"Okay, I won't mention the fact that the rest of you are less intelligent than me," she said. "At least not for the next two days. Satisfied?"

"Uh, that wasn't it, actually," Rick said. He paused. "Though it'd be good if you didn't, of course… Uhm, no, what I meant was, you have to wear a jacket."

Catherine looked down on her black coat. She _liked_ this coat. It looked nice and dramatic when she was moving around. And there were plenty of inner pockets for notepads, aspirins and emergency caffeine pills.

"I don't do bright colours," she said flatly.

"But it's for your own good," Rick said. "It's so everyone who sees you will know it's not okay to shoot at you."

"I'd _rather _get shot than go around looking like a flake!" Catherine complained.

Rick gave her a long, reflecting look.

"In your own weird way, you're really vain, aren't you?" he said. "Except for you vanity isn't about looking good. It's more kind of about looking like you refuse to take part in this stupid world, that kind of thing…"

"What? No I'm not!" Catherine said, though she was secretly impressed by her normally so dense brother's perception.

"Then wear the jacket, Cathy. Please?"

Catherine stuffed her black coat into her pack and changed into a colourful jacket. On the other hand, her expression was black enough to make up for it.

---

Catherine prided herself on being in fairly good shape. She ate right, when she remembered to eat at all, and she went for a jog every morning, if only to make sure that she was capable of running away from scary things should the need arise. So, she told herself, it couldn't be normal for her to feel this tired after just walking at a modest pace for a few hours. It must be the forest sucking her strength out of her.

Of course, she was carrying what felt like a ton of supplies on her back, which might explain something… or else it could, of course, be the life-sapping experience of having to listen to four, count them, four harebrained hunters yapping all around her. The only thing that was worse than listening to them talk among themselves was having one of them talk _to_ her.

"… of course, it was only last year that things really started moving on the stock market," Mel was just saying. "I sold all my United Merchandise and invested in the entertainment sector, and since then, my portfolio has…"

"Does that actually work?" Catherine said.

"What? Investing?"

"No, telling women how much money you've got," Catherine said flatly. "Does that actually make them want to sleep with you?"

Mel had the insolence not to get insulted by the question. Instead, he looked thoughtful.

"Well, not in and of itself," he said. "But look at it this way. Say you've got two sleazebags like me hitting on you. One has oodles of cash, and one doesn't. Which one would you _rather_ sleep with?"

"If I pick the rich guy," Catherine said, "will he give me some of those oodles?"

Mel looked amused.

"I think we're moving dangerously close to solicitation here," he said. "No, you'd probably have to settle for expensive gifts and dinners and so on…"

"In that case, screw it," Catherine said. "I can make my own oodles."

Mel laughed.

"A bit mercenary, aren't you?"

"Not really." Catherine sighed. "I just like money. Or, I like what you can do with money. Get people to cook for you. Clean for you. Go out and get the newspaper for you." She tried to kill a mosquito, but it got away and bit her in the wrist. She growled. "Effing build a bug-free, air-conditioned house for you!"

"Aw, come on." Mel grinned. "Where's the fun in that? What's life if you don't get a little dirty sometimes?" He looked around at the rows of trees with obvious delight. "Suffer the rain and the sun and all the little challenges life has to offer, that's what makes it all worthwhile. All the best things in life are a little messy and hurt a bit."

"You're going to try and bring the conversation back to sex, aren't you?" Catherine said glumly.

"Well, that _is_ an example, yeah…"

Catherine glared at his obnoxiously grinning face, stupid moustache and all.

"Don't you worry a tiny bit that my very big and over-protective brother will kick your ass for putting the moves on me?" she said.

"Nope. We talked about it when he first asked us if it was okay that he invited you along." He chuckled at the memory. "I think his exact words were, 'she won't be interested, she gets very definite about things, and she will be carrying a loaded rifle. Whatever you do is at your own risk.'"

Catherine wasn't entirely sure if she should be flattered by that rather accurate description of her or upset that Rick had washed his hands of the whole thing.

"Well, I'm _not_ interested," she said. "I've got someone I'm interested in, as it happens."

"Ah." Mel nodded. "A fellow city person, I'm guessing."

Catherine thought about Kevin.

"Actually, he'd probably think this was a blast," she said. "Trudging through the wilderness and whatnot. _And_ he's broke most of the time. No oodles there."

"So what's his redeeming features?" Mel said.

"He shaves," Catherine said flatly. Actually, she had no idea what it was she liked about Kevin. He was different from her (and therefore, of course, inferior) in just about every way; steady, honest and simple-hearted as opposed to high-strung, sneaky and ambitious. There was just something reassuringly solid about him, something that made Catherine feel like she could trust him to back her up if need be.

And trust him to stop her if she went too far, for that matter. Six months at Aesop had shown Catherine just how possible it was for her to go _too far_ if no one stopped her, and the scariest thing was that it had taken her those six months to realise it. That raised a question that would have kept her up at night if caffeine and workaholism hadn't already done it - _if I spend that much time doing something that was fucked up and not realising it, what am I doing _right now _that's fucked up without realising it?_

"This is going to be a mighty long weekend if you're going to snap at me every chance you get," Mel said without malice.

Catherine sighed. She _had_ promised Rick to be nice.

"You're right," she said. "I'm sorry. But can we rebel against the mores of Western society and pay an interest to anything except sex and money? Like, those two folks." She gestured to the Pointdexters, who were at the moment some twenty yards further down the path, at the heels of Rick. "What are they like?"

"I'm pretty sure they shave," Mel said, straight-faced.

"I like them already," Catherine responded, equally deadpan - among her good qualities she counted a complete refusal to act ashamed of her bad qualities. "Anything else?"

"Oh, I don't know." Mel counted down on his fingers. "Long-time married couple. Deb's your basic easy-going type, kind of like yours truly. Harry's a bit of a sourpuss, but he's really a good guy - give you the shirt off his back if you ask him, only he'll complain about having to do it for years afterwards. He had some boring, low-level, white-collar job when I met him, and now he's got some boring, high-level, white-collar job. That's about it."

Catherine opened her mouth to make some kind of dry comment, and then the world stopped.

Or at least, the world _slowed down_ - every sound turned low and deep and drawn out, and Catherine's own motions turned sluggish, like she was moving through thick tar. And the colours - the _colours_ were wrong, though she couldn't say how; she felt like she had walked into negative photo, even though the green and grey and yellow of the forest remained as her memory insisted they had always been.

She turned, startled - a motion that seemed to take forever - and caught a glimpse of something large and black standing on four legs among the threes, staring at the five wanderers with burning eyes in a face that would never belong in any sane world.

A voice thundered in her ears. The merciless conviction in it wouldn't have been so horrible if she hadn't recognised the voice as her own.

IT HAS YOUR SCENT NOW.

---

"Catherine? Cathy?"

The ground. Why was she lying on the ground? Ridiculous. People had spent thousands of years inventing devices - floors, carpets, beds, shoes - to minimise their contact with the ground, so why would any sensible person lie down on it? She shouldn't be down here.

She tried to push herself up. Her arms felt like boiled spaghetti.

"Easy, Cathy. Are you okay?"

Rick. Catherine opened her eyes and squinted at him. His big, concerned face filled her field of vision. On the bright side, it seemed to be the normal colour - a kind of pinkish-red.

"I'm fine," she muttered. "Give me some space, would you?"

Rick withdrew slightly, and Catherine made a second - and more successful - attempt to get up. She was shaking in every limb, and that voice - _her_ voice - was still ringing in her ears.

IT HAS YOUR SCENT NOW.

She remembered the creature… no, that wasn't true. She remembered _seeing_ the creature; recalled quite vividly the fear and revulsion she had felt when she saw it. She just couldn't remember, exactly, what it had looked like, other than big, black and ugly.

"Are you all right, dear?" Deborah said. "You gave us quite a scare."

"Yeah, I'm inconsiderate like that," Catherine snapped. "When I pass out, I don't stop to think about people's tender nerves."

"I didn't mean it like that," Deborah said, taken aback.

Catherine knew perfectly well that she hadn't. She just felt like yelling at someone. God damn it, the Heralds had no _right_ to pound her over the head with visions whenever they felt like it!

_Hunter,_ she thought bitterly. _Champion of the hapless human race. Sounds romantic, doesn't it? And with some people, like that moron Fred, maybe it _is _romantic. They can conjure flaming swords, become faster and stronger than anything human has any business being. They have superhuman abilities to use to scourge the wicked. What's not to like about that?_

_Me? I get magical seizures. Can't even take a walk in the woods anymore. I'm not superhuman, I'm subhuman…_

But that was unfair, and she knew it. An Avenger - hah, they even shared their collective _name _with a group of superheroes! - wouldn't have known that anything was up with the woods until something big and malevolent pounced on his unguarded back.

"Does she usually do that?" Harold said. "Rick, you _couldn't_ have been stupid enough to bring someone with epilepsy or something out into the wilderness, right? _Right_?"

"Never happened before," Rick said. He glanced at Catherine. "I think."

"She's probably gotten herself knocked up," Mel said sagely. "Pregnant chicks pass out under strain, right?"

Catherine glared. He grinned.

"They do, and I'm not," she said. She could be depressingly certain about that second part. For all that the Hunter experience were faintly Biblical in its subtexts, she doubted very much that the Heralds thought she had the making of a new Madonna - and that was really the only way it could happen, the way her love life looked at the moment. "I don't know what it is. But my professional opinion is that I should have a doctor check up on me."

Somewhere in the city. Somewhere far away from this forest and whatever it was that lived here.

She hadn't liked the forest since she got into it - heck, hadn't like any forest, ever. But now it was worse. Now she suspected the shadow of every tree, the shape of every mossy stone, to be the cloaked form of something old and sad and hungry.

And there was no defence - no way for her to protect herself or the others. This was the forest, not the city; there were no strings to pull, no deceptions to weave, no weapons to grasp. The city served her, when she understood its rules. The forest _ignored_ her. And when the Anomaly came for her, her final scream would just be one more squeak of a captured prey…

"Yeah, but…" Rick said.

"But what?" Catherine growled. It was all she could do not to turn and run, run until the forest released her from its leafy clutches…

"But we're like half an hour from the camp site," Rick said. "We're three hours from the cars. And it's going to be dark soon. Wouldn't it be better for you to rest before we go back?"

_Dark soon._ To walk back all the way. Through the dark. With things out there waking up and getting ready to hunt…

Catherine wanted to scream. She was caught, caught, and every path just led her further into the Anomaly's power.

---

Rick and crew's traditional camp site was a nice enough clearing by a small brook. There was a ring of rocks on the ground, from old campfires, but otherwise Rick had obeyed the old adage about leaving nothing except your footprints - though he had taken a bit more than just pictures, Catherine supposed.

"You boys put up the tents," Deborah said as the party had settled down. She spoke with a kind of maternal, fussy authority that Catherine could only envy. "I'll cook up some nice tomato soup for our ailing girl here."

As the men set about their work, Deborah produced a spirit kitchen, a pot and a can of soup from her pack and went to work with producing dinner. Catherine managed to feel a touch of sarcastic amusement at the division of work. It seemed that the feministic ideals of western society stopped applying at the city borders. How appropriate.

"It's really a shame, you getting ill, dear," Deborah said as she carried a pot-full of water from the brook and put it on the heater. "I was rather hoping you'd end up enjoying yourself after all. It'd be nice to have another lady with us on these trips." She smiled cherubically. "It's hard not to feel a little outnumbered - though I _do_ enjoy having three strapping men all to myself!" She giggled.

Catherine, who was sitting cross-legged a few steps away from Deborah's cooking endeavours, forced herself to be nice. One should not snap at people who could be dead in the morning. One should not snap at anyone at all, when oneself could be dead in the morning.

"I don't think that would have happened, no matter what," she said carefully. "You seem nice and all, don't get me wrong. I just don't think I have a lot in common with you. And wildlife gives me hives."

"Oh, it's not so bad." Deborah poured soup mixture into the water and stirred it with a wooden spoon. "I wasn't too fond of these trips to start with, either. I just went along with it because Harold was so adamant about it." She smiled fondly at her husband, who was pounding down a tent peg some twenty paces away, with his back to the women. "I think it's important for men to get back to their roots sometimes. You know? The whole noble savage thing?" She chuckled. "Take my Harold for example. He sits at a desk all day long, all week long, filling out forms and checking to make sure that other people filled out their forms right. He never gets a sense of accomplishment, do you see, dear? But once a year, he can come out here and prove himself against the wilds. It's been good for him."

"If you say so," Catherine said.

"Well… it might have something to do with that promotion he got after we'd been coming out here a couple of years," Deborah admitted. "These days, all he does is still sitting at a desk and checking that people fill out their forms, but at least now he can call people in if they haven't done it right and yell at them."

"Which is another guy thing, I suppose," Catherine said. She couldn't exactly argue against that. Certainly all her past boyfriends - well, all three of them - had been loud and opinionated, even more so than herself. "Well, what guys do to feel macho is their business, I suppose." More to have something to say than because she cared, she added, "You don't get that out of it, though? That whole return-to-your-roots thing?"

Deborah giggled.

"Why, women don't need to return to our roots," she said. "We never lost them. Motherhood and nurturing is still a big part of the modern world, even if they're getting a little frayed around the edges, perhaps. No, it's men who haven't got a place in the world anymore, poor dears."

"For most parts, it was them who built the world," Catherine muttered. "They're effing welcome to it."

Deborah's ideas about what the core of womanhood was bothered her a bit. Catherine had thought about children, sometimes - certainly when things had gotten the most serious with Stefan. She just wasn't sure where, if anywhere, she fit into that maternal picture. Certainly she couldn't imagine herself fussing over someone the way her own mother did over Rick and her. It wasn't impossibly that there was some other parenting style that did suit her, by all means, but…

_Oh, get real, Faller,_ she told herself. _That question's moot, anyway. Or do you actually believe that you'll live long enough for it to matter? You're a Hunter - which is another way of saying that you're a dead woman, you just haven't stopped moving yet. It doesn't matter how smart you are, or how many freakish powers you manifest. Sooner or later, the night will come when you go out to face some critter, and never come back. Some night, the Anomaly's going to win._

_Newsflash: it could be tonight._

She looked around. The forest was darkening. She felt very out of her element - very small, and exposed, and scared.

She tried to reassure herself. Five people, with five rifles. One Hunter, with psychic visions and the power to Deny. Surely that was formidable enough a force against a single creature, no matter how powerful, no matter if it was on its home field? Especially when they didn't need to kill it, just keep it away for one night?

But she couldn't quite bring herself to believe it. The trees clawed at the sky with their malformed branches, and the brook flowed by, licking greedily over slippery stones, chilly and impure. The forest itself seemed to mock her with its self-satisfied chaos, with its utter indifference to her plight.

Catherine was not a woman who was familiar with despair. The novelty of the sensation made it all the more bitter.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 17 (continued):_

_One night not too long ago, I dreamt that I was standing on a high place - high as Mount Everest, a spire towering over all the countries of the Earth. And - because this was a dream, and dreams are freaky that way - I could see every single one of those countries clearly, like they were just a few steps away._

_All over the world, the forests were burning. New land was rising out of the ocean, until the greater water expands were reduced to small lakes and narrow rivers. The deserts were blooming, not with wild flowers but with wheat and corn. The mountains were falling to dust, and cities sprawled in the flatlands that came in their place._

_Rick was with me on the spire. He said: "Oh, Cathy, look what you've done."_

_And I said: "Yes, look what I've done."_

_When I woke up I was crying._

_I was crying, because it had only been a dream._

---

THE CYCLE REPEATS.

"Go away…" Catherine mumbled, half-awake. She had spent hours tossing and turning in her sleeping bag, in her tent that she - alone among the five hunters - had all to herself. She was too scared to sleep, and too tired to stay awake. The compromise was not a pleasant one; a sort of marsh between sleep and wakefulness, when nightmares took on the urgency of reality, and harsh reality intruded upon dreams.

THE CYCLE REPEATS. The voice, _her_ voice, slipped in through her foggy, half-dreaming thoughts like a knife through flesh. The sensation made an image form in Catherine's drowsy mind, oddly compelling; a taller, stronger and utterly merciless version of herself was standing over her, speaking in that commanding voice, and as soon as she opened her eyes she would see her superhuman self.

She squeezed her eyes shut; she didn't want to see a Catherine Faller that didn't share her weaknesses, a Catherine Faller that was cold, heartless purpose incarnate. Didn't want to see the Catherine Faller other people saw.

THE CYCLE REPEATS.

With a muffled scream, Catherine threw herself out of her sleeping bag, her knife slipping out of its hidden sheathe in her left sleeve and stabbing at the darkness. Die, you soulless bitch, die…!

But of course, she was alone in the tent. There was no super-Catherine. There was just a very un-super Catherine sitting up with a knife clutched in her hand, gasping and panting and feeling cold sweat on her forehead. Even the voice had gone silent. She could, in theory, go back to sleep.

But now she was fully awake, and she could no more turn her back on a clue to a mystery than she could… well, than she could stop being Catherine Faller. So she sheathed the knife, pulled on her boots and jacket, and stuck her head out of the tent.

The campfire Rick had lighted last night had burned down to embers, but in their faint light, she could just make out a dark, voluminous shape disappearing into the woods.

_Someone answering a call of nature,_ her sensible side suggested.

But the voice in her head had woken her up _just_ in time to see this person - either Harold or Deborah; it was too broad to be Mel and too short to be Rick - depart. That couldn't be a coincidence. And a fine seer she'd be, if she didn't trust her own prophesies.

She started walking in the direction the shape had disappeared. It only took her about three steps to find out that moving swiftly in a dark forest was risky, and that moving silently was impossible. Within five seconds she had made enough noise – what with breaking twigs, rustling bushes, and, of course, swearing furiously – that she was sure that the nightly deserter must have heard her. But if so, he didn't come back to see what all the commotion was about.

After a while, though, Catherine started feeling pretty stupid. She was fumbling around in the woods in the middle of the night, with only a limited idea about which way led back to camp, with no idea at all where the person she was looking for had gotten to, and with an unidentified Anomaly loose in the area.

_Aw, shit. One of these days, curiosity _will _kill the Cat…_

She fumbled for the flashlight she always wore in her inner pocket, remembered that she wasn't wearing her coat but instead a hunting jacket, and swore inventively. If she ever got her hands on uber-Catherine, she'd choke the uber-life out of her. She could at least have given her some idea what was going on, exactly. THE CYCLE REPEATS? Bah.

Oh, well. She wasn't getting anywhere with her wits. That meant that she would have to take the moron's way out, and rely on her very unreliable gifts. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, _focused_…

(_Catherine wanders for several hours, but when dawn breaks she is forced to admit that she's irrevocably lost_)

Catherine shuddered. Not much of a future. The vision hadn't shown what would happen after dawn broke, but it might very well include starving and freezing to death in the middle of the woods. Or getting eaten by an Anomaly.

She turned ninety degrees, _focused_…

(_Catherine walks for a few minutes, then reaches the brook. Following it upstream, she eventually finds the camp again_)

Catherine smiled faintly. So being a Hunter was good for something, at least. She drew an arrow on a mossy rock. There. That way, for when she wanted to go back. But for now, she still had a mystery to deal with.

Another ninety degrees. _Focus_.

(_Catherine walks on until she hears sounds from close by; a human voice, and animal growls. She walks closer…_)

The vision stopped, faded to nothing despite her best efforts to hold on to it. Her heart was beating much faster than what was comfortable, as if she'd run a mile. Had there been something more, at the end of the vision? Something she'd blacked out… or which had been blacked out for her, perhaps?

_Damn it, I know zero about how this works. And every time I think I've got a decent theory together, something happens that disproves it. Hunterdom should come with an instruction manual…_

She set off in the last direction. It was probably stupid, but she'd come this far, and she was much too irritable to be sensible at the moment.

And besides, it wasn't like she'd get any sleep tonight, anyway…

Soon, she heard the sounds from her vision; a human voice, gleeful and laughing, and animal growls, deep and furious. She drew her knife again – probably akin to running with scissors, carrying a knife when walking somewhere you were likely to stumble, but what the heck – and followed the sound.

There was another clearing. There was… was…

The world slowed down. Catherine struggled to move in air that felt like quicksand. The dark trees around her seemed to pulsate in the rhythm of her own heart, and all the colours were wrong again.

Harold was there. Catherine was absurdly sure it was him, though she couldn't tell how she knew; he looked nothing like he usually did. In fact, she wasn't quite sure _what_ he looked like right now. The thing he had turned into had height, depth, breadth and a few other qualities that she could identify as normal, but otherwise, it seemed so alien that she didn't have the words to describe it. Except for one thing, that was. It carried a knife. A big one.

He was fighting against something. Something large – but still looking tiny compared to him – and black, and shapeless. When Catherine looked at it, she felt as if she had developed some twisted form of synesthesia. Instead of visual impressions, she got emotional impressions; anger, weariness, sadness, malice.

The battle… well, how _could_ you describe a battle between two combatants with physical appearances that you couldn't even get straight in your head? All Catherine knew was that they were beating the shit out of each other, and that there was technicolour blood on the ground already.

"Stop!" she cried, and then again, with the power of the Heralds behind it, "_STOP!_"

The surreal scene collapsed, turned inwards on itself and was swallowed up. Catherine found herself on her knees on the moist ground, gasping for breath. Her mind was a whirlpool of impossible images. For the first time, she seriously contemplated the idea that she might have gone insane. Wasn't that the fate that lay in store for all Hunters? Insanity and death?

"Idiot!" Harold whimpered. He was lying on his belly on the ground, clawing feebly at the moss with both hands. "You've _wrecked _it! You've ruined everything! Do you have any idea what you've _done_?"

"No," Catherine said in a blank, empty voice. For the moment, her usual sarcasm seemed to have abandoned her. There just wasn't room for it in her flooded mind. "Sorry, no." The situation seemed to call for something more, so she settled for the old reliable. "I need to do more experiments, is it okay if I hand in my report on Monday…?"

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 17 (continued):_

_Why do we feel so guilty about doing damage to nature?_

_No, seriously. Why do we?_

_People whine about how nature has given us all we've got, and in return we've ravaged and polluted it. But that's just not true. Nature hasn't given us anything. Everything we got from it, we had to rip out of nature's greedy, clutching hands. The only thing nature gives freely is fruit and water. And those we have to compete over with all sorts of critters who have bigger teeth than we have._

_Throughout our history, we've beaten predators, plagues, famines, draughts, floods… just about everything, in fact, that nature has ever felt like throwing at us. And we survived it, all of it. We suffered and we struggled and we despaired, but in the end we prevailed and built a civilisation where nature can't hurt us so much – though of course, we still hurt each other as much as ever, but that's another issue._

_We did it. We won. We beat the bully._

_How on earth did we end up feeling _sorry _for the bastard?_

_It's like something out there finally figured out that it wasn't going to win by attacking our bodies…_

---

"So let me get this straight…" Catherine said.

She and Harold were walking back towards the camp. It was easier this time around, since Harold had brought both a flashlight and considerable familiarity with the area. This didn't stop him from fuming, though. Catherine had thought she was a good fumer, but Harold had a way of expressing his complete and utter hatred of her without saying a word.

"You come out here every year," Catherine said, "and you go to meet this Anomaly. The two of you fight, your knife against his claws. You always win. And then the next year, it all starts over again?"

"That's right. Yes." Harold scowled.

"Right, just checking." Catherine shook her head. "The obvious question is _why_…"

"You couldn't possible understand."

That raised Catherine's hackles. As far as she was concerned, she could understand everything that needed understanding. If there was something that went beyond her comprehension, then her working theory was that it was probably beyond the comprehension of every _sensible_ person in the world.

Quite possibly per definition, since as far as Catherine could tell, she _was_ the only sensible person in the world.

"And why is that, pray tell?" she said.

"You're a woman," Harold said.

"You don't say? Gee, I guess that _would_ explain all the menstruating." She gave Harold a particularly nasty look. "The lack of male genitalia could also be a clue, but not a very conclusive one, because that's a condition you are going to share with me if you don't stop talking bullshit and answer my question _right this minute_! Okay?"

Harold snorted.

"I'm telling you, if you have to ask, then you wouldn't understand! I mean, it's all so easy for _you_. You grow up playing with dollies and stuff…"

"Never liked dollies," Catherine said. "Except the one my mom gave me for my fifth birthday. It was nice and heavy. I used it to hit Rick over the head with when he was bugging me."

"What _did_ you use to play with?"

"My _The Little Magician_ box. I wanted to be the next Houdini. Ironic, when you think about it." She had actual, factual magical powers now, and mostly they were just making her nervous. "And you're avoiding the question!"

Harold growled.

"All right! The point is, _I_ used to play with action figures. And now I spend my days shuffling papers. I need _something_ to make me feel like I'm not some kind of non-person!"

Catherine sighed. This sounded suspiciously like a rather darker side of what Deborah had been telling her yesterday. Harold went into the woods to wrestle monsters once a year, so he could feel _manly_.

"So now what's going to happen?" Catherine said. "You fought the Anomaly, and for the first time, you didn't defeat it. It ended in a draw instead. What's going to come of that?"

Harold was silent.

"You have no idea?" Catherine said, taken aback. "You never tried to figure out how this thing worked?"

"Look, once a year I go to that clearing, the world goes all spooky, the monster shows up, we fight, I win, it flees," Harold said. "I stumbled on it by accident, and then I just kept coming back."

Catherine took a deep breath and bit her teeth together. She had promised Rick, hadn't she? No telling people how stupid they were. Even when that was very, very stupid indeed. Honestly, was she the only one in existence who took an _interest_ in how things worked?

"Well, it's not like I don't have any ideas," Harold said defensively. "I think maybe it's some kind of never-ending battle. You know, like between Set and Apophis in Egyptian mythology?"

Catherine gave him a blank look. She had never felt the need to learn more about ancient superstitions.

"Okay, so you don't know," Harold said, exasperated. "Well, the short of it is, every night the warrior god Set fights Apophis, the serpent who wants to swallow the sun and plunge the world into eternal night. And every morning Set wins, and the sun rises. I think me and that monster… well, we're something like that."

"You think that if you don't come here once a year and defeat it, the sun won't rise?" Catherine said dubiously.

"Well, maybe not the sun!" Harold snapped. "But something bad would happen! I'm preventing it by standing up to that freak every year. There's probably been others before me, you just never hear of them." He nodded resolutely. "I'm the champion of mankind."

Catherine looked at Harold. Chubby little Harold, with his thinning hair and his bright orange jacket and his self-important expression. And laughed, a shrill, tittering laugh at the pure absurdity of the situation.

"What?" Harold said. "What's so damn funny, mind telling me that?"

"Maybe nothing." Catherine pulled her pendant out from under her shirt and held up the silver glyph for Harold to see. "What does this mean?"

"Mean? I don't know." Harold shook his head. "Is it supposed to mean something?"

Catherine glanced at the pendant, the lines of it translating in her mind, with the unthinking ease of a word written in normal letters, into _Prophet_.

_He's not a Hunter. He just thinks he is._

Or maybe mankind had other guardians than Hunters? That was a new thought, and a disturbing one. Maybe for general missions, the Heralds created Hunters – people with special powers and insights, capable of communicating with each other and coordinating their activities, and generally able to fight a multitude of different battles. And maybe for very specific purposes, the Heralds made do with the likes of Harold – people capable of fighting only one exact battle, over and over again.

That wasn't the disturbing bit, of course. The disturbing bit was that if Harold _did_ serve the Heralds as Catherine did, then she had messed up a vital operation here – and she had no idea what the consequences would be.

Mind you, she had done so after being prodded by the Heralds… but that meant nothing. Most of the time, Catherine figured the Heralds were just some sort of subconscious entities, some kind of genetic imperative – and as such, about as far from being perfect and omniscient as they could be.

"Never mind," she said and slipped the pendant back into her shirt. "So now you think we're going to find out if the Anomaly doesn't get defeated?"

"I suppose," Harold said. "Why do you keep calling it 'the Anomaly'?"

Catherine shrugged. She wasn't about to explain the real score to this moron, at least not until she had to.

"It seemed as good a name as any," she said, truthfully but incompletely.

The sun was rising when they came back to the camp site. The other three were already up, and having an animated discussion. As Catherine and Harold appeared out of the forest, it quickly ended. Rick and Deborah both got up and ran over to them, fiercely hugging Catherine and Harold, respectively.

"We were so worried!" Deborah said, at the verge of tears.

"There, there," Harold said, patting her back. His voice was a bit softer when he was talking to his wife.

"Get off me, you big baboon!" Catherine complained, pushing Rick away. "I'm _fine_!"

"Aw, come on, Cathy." Rick allowed her to slip out of his grasp, but he was grinning. "Your big brother has a right to be worried when you slip off in the middle of the night, doesn't he? What _happened_?"

"You don't want to know," Catherine said.

"Oooh, ooooh, I _do_ want to know!" Mel hollered cheerfully. "Does it involve frenzied extramarital couplings? Because I'm very interested in that!"

"Mel!" Deborah snapped.

"Just _kidding_, Debs," Mel said, grinning insolently. "We all know Harry's much too boring and straight-laced to ever do anything interestingly sleazy."

"What kind of 'I don't want to know' is it?" Rick said, his expression suffering. "Is it the kind of 'I don't want to know' that I'm just not interested in, the kind that you just don't want to explain, or is it…"

"It's the _bad_ kind of 'you don't want to know,' okay?" Catherine said.

Rick groaned.

"I knew it. I _knew_ it would be."

"Oh, don't be a wuss," Catherine snapped and walked up to the centre of the camp. "Look, people, for the sake of this conversation, let's say there's an injured bear out there who's feeling particularly cranky. We need to break camp and get out of here, like fast."

"'For the sake of this conversation'?" Mel said, raising an eyebrow.

"For the sake of your life," Catherine said flatly, "assume that even if it isn't an injured bear per se, it's still big and nasty and wants to kill you."

"Works for me," Mel said, mellowly enough.

He went and started taking his tent down. The others quickly followed his example.

---

An hour later, they were standing around while Rick and Harold were fussing about at the edge of the clearing, trying to find the trail.

"This is impossible!" Rick complained. "It was here yesterday! It's been here _every _time we've gone here! It can't just _disappear_!"

"Maybe it's just been overgrown?" Deborah suggested.

"Over night?" Mel said.

Deborah shrugged unhappily. Catherine felt vaguely sorry for her. She knew what it was like to try to find reasonable explanations to all the crazy shit the universe dropped on you. And there was probably no mundane reason why, after a fairly calm and quiet night, there should not be a trail where a trail had always been.

"Hey, Rick." Unlike all the others except Catherine, Harold didn't look scared or confused. Instead he looked focused. "Do you remember that big rock that's on the left side of the path, just when you come into the campsite?"

"Yeah?" Rick said.

"And that crooked tree that's standing just about right next to it, on the other side?" Harold said.

"Oh, I remember those," Deborah said. "I've always thought it was a little like a gate, walking between those two."

"Yeah. Well…" Harold stepped aside and showed what he had been standing in front of.

It was a crooked tree growing right next to a big boulder. There was a space of perhaps two inches between them.

No more.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 17 (concluded):_

_Heck with all this philosophy. I don't even know myself where I'm going with it._

_The fact of the matter is this; the path back to our cars is gone. What's more, the very space it used to occupy is gone. It's like the world was just a picture, and now someone's cut a slice out of it and taped the two remaining pieces together._

_Rick and Harold wants us to try to walk in the direction we came from and see if we run into the path again – or, at the very least, if we eventually leave the forest. We should, I suppose. Whatever this thing is, it can't just change the whole world at a whim._

_I hope._

_So I'm going to put away the notebook and joined the others – I think they're just waiting for me by now, anyway. And then I'll see if I can get out of here, or if I have to stay and try to figure out this whole mess._

_I effing hate nature. I may have mentioned that._


	2. Chapter 2

Here we go. The second part, and the actual ending. Which, sadly, leaves a couple of loose ends and doesn't have room for a few things that I had meant to include… but that's life for you, I guess.

For the first time, in this story I'm including a very brief POV from the monster-of-the-week character. Hopefully that doesn't rob the story of too much of the I-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-is-going-on feel of _Hunter_.

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18:_

_For some reason, I just can't stop thinking about what I wrote last time._

_Yes, people who make the effort of putting some thought into life tend to love forests and hate cities. But why is that? Why is that really, if we for a moment abstain from cranky, cynical comments about how stupid everyone else is?_

_Well, for starters, I suppose, forests are alive. Everything you see around you, pretty much, is a fellow living creature. Perhaps more importantly, too, a fellow feeling creature. Everything you do in a forest will be registered, noticed, experienced. Cities ignore you, but forests see you._

_Okay, so I think that if that's all you want, then you might as well just put up video cameras on every house wall, but never mind, no one listens to good advice these days…_

---

Catherine felt cold and tired and wanted to sit down somewhere and have a good long cry. Seeing as she didn't have time for that, and was in no hurry to humiliate herself in front of the bozos she was stuck with, she wanted to do the next best thing and snap at someone.

Sadly, no one was saying anything irrevocably stupid at the moment. In fact, no one was saying much at all. Harold and Rick exchanged the odd couple of words about which way they ought to go, but otherwise, the party was silent.

Rick was probably the one who were handling this best, as far as Catherine could see. He had gone into his super-practical mode. That was his way of handling a crisis; he just shut down all unnecessary emotion and did whatever was reasonable to do. That was a good thing – the last thing she wanted was for Rick to break down because he was right in the middle of exactly the kind of bad craziness that he was so desperate to avoid.

Harold was looking cranky and self-pitying. Catherine could faintly make out muffled curses from him whenever she came close, and his pudgy face was covered by a petulant pout more often than not. His little adventure had gone wrong, after all; it wasn't just a predictable victory over a monster anymore. Now there was real danger, and for all that he fancied himself the champion of mankind he hadn't signed up for that. Catherine felt contempt towards him, but also a bit of guilt; it was after all true, he _hadn't_ signed up for this, and everything would have worked out just as smoothly as every previous year if she hadn't butted in.

Deborah was looking pale and somehow unmade, like the insane situation she was in had robbed her of some basic coherence. Her face was grey and flabby like unbaked dough, and she walked with jerky motions, like her body was no longer entirely under her control.

Mel, for his part, was disturbing Catherine. She couldn't help wondering if the strain had cracked his tiny, fragile, womanising mind. He kept looking around, giggling to himself, muttering beneath his breath and shaking his head in what seemed like amused disbelief. Perhaps it was too much to ask that he might just be dealing with the situation in his own way. Hoping that he wouldn't suddenly go nuts and start trying to kill people might be a more plausible bet.

_And me? Let's put the good doctor under the microscope, shall we? How am _I _dealing with this?_

Not especially well, to be honest. But for her, it wasn't the situation in itself. She had suffered stranger… well, she had suffered more intense ones, at least. No, what got her all turned around inside was the environment. When something strange happened in the city, she could observe it with accuracy, because she could easily tell _normal_ from _abnormal_ in the city. The city had a pulse, a feel, an air to it that she was very aware of, and against it the Anomalous events showed up in stark relief. Out here, she had no idea what was what. What was a forest supposed to feel like? What was the _song _of the forest, that she was supposed to detect disharmony in? For all she knew, everything around her could be tainted, or everything around her could be completely normal and they were just ordinarily lost by now, outside of the Anomaly's influence.

_Or maybe a forest is always tainted, all the time. Maybe sanity and normality ends at the city limits…_

But that was probably less a piece of astute observation of the true nature of things, and more a display of personal bias. Probably.

"Are we getting anywhere?" she said as Harold and Rick stopped to confer yet another time. "If you're going to walk in circles anyway, can I sit down and wait for you to come around again? It'd go easier on my feet."

"No, no, we can't be going in circles," Rick said. "I brought a compass. See?" He displayed the little glass box. "We're heading pretty straight towards east-north-east. I'm not exactly sure where we'll end up, but we'll definitely leave the woods at some point."

"That'd be nice," Catherine grumbled. "Either way, could we take a break? My back hurts."

"I guess that can't hurt." Rick shrugged. "Let's take ten, people." He grinned. "Smoke if you've got'em."

"Anyone want a cookie?" Deborah said with frail cheer. "I brought them as a treat for tonight, but we might as well."

Catherine sat down on her pack a dozen steps away from the others, watching in awe as Harold and Rick accepted cookies.

_Look at them,_ she thought. _Lost in the woods, the path magically disappeared, something big and nasty on the loose, and what's on their mind? Biscuits. Of course, that's on purpose, I suppose. They want to think of anything _except _just how bizarre the situation is._

_How come I can't do that? I just keep obsessing about whatever it is that's bothering me at the moment._

Except right now, she wasn't, she realised. It wasn't that she was trying not to think about their predicament, or that something else was distracting her. It was that when her mind tried to reason its way through the problem, it just didn't get anywhere. There were no loose ends to grab hold of, no leads to follow, nothing. Just a lot of random weirdness.

It would seem that she was lost in more ways than one.

Mel sat down next to her, thereby proving the truism that nothing was ever so bad it couldn't deteriorate further.

"Go away," Catherine said. "Go have a cookie. Or something. Just leave me alone. I'm brooding."

"Not really a cookie person," Mel said with a nervous little chuckle. "Too sweet."

"I notice you're not going away," Catherine said.

Mel didn't answer for a while, which was at least something.

"This is all my fault, isn't it?" he then said.

"Doubtful," Catherine said. It was partly her fault, partly Harold's fault, mostly the damn Anomaly's fault. For all that she would have loved to blame Mel for everything imaginable up to and including the Vandal sack of Rome, he seemed to be an innocent bystander here.

"No, I'm serious," he said. "This is some kind of divine punishment, isn't it?" He laughed shrilly. "Geez, I didn't mean to get all of you dragged into it with me. I just didn't know that could happen. Well, technically I guess I didn't know there really _was_ such a thing as divine punishment, but…"

"Are you rambling hysterically?" Catherine said with mild interest. "Am I supposed to slap you? Because I think slapping you would really cheer me up right now."

"No, no, I'm just… okay, yeah, I'm a little hysterical, I guess." Mel smiled weakly. "But all of this… See, when I was growing up, my mom always used to tell me that if I was bad, the devil was going to drag me off to Hell."

"Mine told me that if I was bad – by which she meant refusing to do my chores and not being nice to my brother, mostly – I wouldn't learn the things I'd need in order to catch myself a man when I grew up," Catherine said. "I guess different mothers have different ideas about what the absolute worst thing is that can happen."

"Yeah, well…" Mel shrugged. "The thing was, it never seemed to happen. I'd cheat on tests, and steal pennies from her purse, and peek at the girls in their locker room – stuff like that. And sometimes I was caught, sure, but other times I got clean away with it, and the devil just didn't seem to notice."

"Must have been asleep on the job," Catherine said. "Shameful."

"This has to be it, though," Mel said. "Doesn't it? That's the only thing that makes sense. The devil's come for me."

"How bad can you possibly have been?" Catherine said. "I've done things that would have made your hair curl, and I haven't heard anything from the devil."

Not unless the Imbuing was some kind of twisted version of poetic justice, at least. Catherine supposed it'd make some kind of sense. If you had lots of mildly sinful people running around up there, why not use them to send the _truly_ evil creatures of the world down to Hell? That would keep them out of trouble, and had the added benefit that sooner or later some vampire or whatnot would kill them, and they'd join their victims in the infernal regions.

But while certain of the nuttier Hunters would have appreciated that theory, Catherine found it somewhat unlikely.

"I'm not a good person," Mel admitted. "Or, well, I am. Sort of. I'm not a child molester or anything. But I have this slight tendency to take the easy way out. And I can't seem to turn down the chance for a good time…" He gave her a shaky smile. "It never seemed like such a bad thing, just trying to have a good time."

Catherine grimaced. She had a reasonably good idea what he meant, and it didn't really raise her opinions of him.

"Men usually don't think so," she said. "And hey, God's a guy. He'll probably understand." She winced. "I mean, obviously he doesn't care very much about women suffering, or he wouldn't have created fungus infections…"

"You're not taking a word I say seriously, are you?" Mel said.

"Not ever," Catherine said flatly.

That made him recover his usual obnoxious cheer a bit. He gave her what was almost a real smirk this time.

"Okay, so what do _you_ think is happening, Doctor Smartass?"

"Mass hypnosis?" Catherine suggested. "The path was there, we just didn't register it?"

"Mass hypnosis? Caused by what?"

"Still working on that part."

Mel glanced at her.

"When you came back to camp this morning, you said that there was something big and scary loose in the woods," he said. "What was that all about?"

"You wouldn't believe me," Catherine said.

"I just told you I believe that this is a punishment from on high."

"Yes," Catherine said. "And I, having just heard that, tell you that you wouldn't believe me. _That's_ how unbelievable it is." She frowned. "Why are you talking to me, anyway? If you need to lighten your heart, shouldn't you be talking to, you know, your actual _friends_?"

Mel grinned at her. This time it was his usual grin, insolent, cheery and annoying.

"Nah. If I'm going to tell someone that I got us into this mess by being evil and sinful, it's going to be someone who _already _hates me."

"There is some kind of unethical logic in that." Catherine sighed. "Come on, I think our ten is up…"

She got up from her pack, lifted it back onto her back, and walked over to the others.

---

The grass was still flattened from the pack when the five of them returned to the spot they had rested, about an hour later.

"No… no, this just isn't happening," Rick groaned. "I was checking so _carefully_…"

"If anyone needs me, I'm going to be lying down here and dying," Catherine said. She threw herself down on her stomach, pressing her face against the ground. "This is a nightmare! It's the forest that never ends! Who needs monsters? We've got endless trees!"

"Cathy, you're not improving morale," Rick said in a suffering tone.

Catherine had to admit that she really wasn't. But she had let herself be fooled, hadn't she? She had gotten caught up in the let's-pretend-nothing-strange-is-happening-and-then-maybe-it-won't-be attitude of the others. This was a forest, and if you walked far enough in a straight line in a forest, you got out of it. You couldn't argue with that reasoning. Those were the _rules_.

Of course, with an Anomaly around, the rules weren't applying. Hence the name, come to think of it.

_So that leaves me stuck in the woods for an indefinite period of time. What the heck are we supposed to do when we run out of supplies? _She mustered some wry humour. _I suppose I could survive for a little while longer by eating Deborah. She's got a lot of meat on her._

"Oh, it's obvious what's going on," Harold snapped. "Rick, your compass is busted."

"I suppose so." Rick studied the compass morosely. "Though I don't understand why it should break down just when I need it…"

"Murphy's Law," Mel said sagely.

Catherine grinded her teeth. She had a pretty good idea why, and sheer bad luck didn't enter into it – not any more than usual, at least. There were Anomalies that could sabotage modern equipment, making guns click, cars stall and radios fill with static. Now, that was a disturbing fact, not just because it reduced the whole business to fists against claws, but because an Anomaly that could sabotage one tool could sabotage another. That sort of hinted that all products of modern science had some common denominator which it did not share with, say, the interplay of muscles and sinews. But either way, presumably such Anomalies could also make compasses point every which way.

"So why don't we just go back to the camp site and follow the brook out of the forest?" Deborah said. "I mean, that's what you're supposed to do, isn't it?"

"Assuming the brook hasn't disappeared," Catherine mumbled.

"Come again?" Rick said.

"Nothing. Nothing." Catherine rolled her eyes. "No, I definitely think we should all assume that the usual rules have _not _stopped applying and that the sane order of the universe _can _still be counted upon. That doesn't strike me as a risky assumption at _all_."

"Oh, just ignore her," Harold said with disgust. "She's been nothing but trouble since we came here."

"Hey," Rick said dangerously. "Watch it, Harry. That's my sister you're talking about."

"No, no, it's okay." Catherine got to her feet. The last thing she needed was a fight breaking out because Rick wanted to defend her honour. "Camp site. Brook. I'm all over it."

The party started moving again.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18 (continued):_

_They say that we are genetically indistinguishable from our ancestors 100.000 years back._

_Can that have something to do with it, too? Are the images of looming trees and clinging bushes and bug-filled swamps engraved in our brains, regardless of whether we have ever seen any ourselves?_

_Is there a little voice in our heads saying "I should dress in animal skins. I should live in a mud hut. I should eat nothing but nuts and berries and mammoth meat. I should be a proper human being"? Because if there were, that would account for so much._

_Do I have a voice like that?_

_If it turns out I do, I think I'm going to have to hunt it down and gag it immediately…_

---

Catherine was getting tired of slogging along at the tail of the group. Her feet hurt, her back ached, her fur skirt was chafing at her waist and the berry basket she was carrying was pricking the naked skin of her side…

Woah. Stop. Halt. Run through that again, and pay especial attention to 'fur skirt.'

Catherine looked down. She was indeed wearing the skin of some shaggy animal or another around her waist so that it covered her down to her knees, along with some kind of leather strap that crossed her chest and seemed to hold something heavy in place on her back. Other than that, and the clumsily made container she was carrying, she wasn't wearing anything at all.

_I'm pretty sure I was wearing something else a moment ago,_ she thought. _This is _definitely _not right. I just can't remember what I'm _supposed _to be wearing…_

"Uhm… hold on a moment," Mel said. He stopped in his tracks, his small, ratty eyes glancing out nervously through the mass of shaggy hair that covered his head. "Something's wrong."

"Is something following us?" Rick said. He took his great club from its resting place on his shoulder and gripped it in two hands. "Wolves?"

"No, it's just…" Mel scratched his head with his left hand, the one that wasn't holding the spear. "Did something just _change_? Like, was everything different a moment ago?"

"The wind seems to be the same." Deborah sniffed at the air. "And I don't smell anything odd. And the birds are still singing…"

Catherine made a mighty effort to keep her gaze firmly at Deborah's face. She wasn't sure why. All right, so the sight of Deborah's big, slack breasts wasn't one you treasured, but why should it make her uncomfortable? It was just stupid to wear on perfectly good skins by covering more of yourself than necessary when it was warm enough that you didn't need it…

She realised that she had crossed her arms strategically over her own emancipated bosom. She lowered her arms angrily. What was _wrong_ with her? No, scratch that, what was wrong with _everything_? Why couldn't she _think_…?

"Oh, enough of this!" Harold snapped. "It's just your imagination, Mel. Let's get back to the camp already!"

_No,_ Catherine thought, with increased confidence. _No, I most certainly do not live in a camp. I don't know about the rest, but I don't live in anything as stupid as a camp. Every fibre of my being wouldn't object to that idea if I was._

_Unless I'm going insane. There's that, I suppose._

_No, Mel feels it too. We can't both be insane. You don't get epidemics of madness, after all…_

The tribe started trudging along in silence again. Catherine tried to figure out what was wrong and remember how things were supposed to be when they were right, and ate a couple of berries from her basket just because she had a feeling she shouldn't. They tasted sour enough to make her mouth curdle.

The camp did look familiar, a clearing situated near a brook (well, that made sense; fresh water didn't grow on trees). Catherine didn't exactly recognise the hide tents, though, despite the fact that they looked pretty settled in. And lived in, for that matter. They smelled.

Harold heaved the young gazelle he had shot down beside the cold camp fire, then with obvious relish sat down beside it. He sighed with content to be off his feet.

"No, no, no," Catherine groaned. "This just _can't_ be right. We're in a damn forest. You don't _get_ gazelles in a forest, that doesn't make any _sense_…"

"What?" Harold said absently. He produced a flint knife and started marking out where to make his first cut on the deer carcass beside him.

"Uhm…" Catherine blinked. She had seen… hadn't she? Her vague recollection of what Harold had been carrying on the way here had trouble maintaining itself against the very tangible fact of what was actually lying there right in front of her eyes. "Nothing, I guess…"

Deborah had set to work with getting the fire started. Her means of doing so, Catherine noted, was the old rub-two-sticks-together method, which she was sure was very primitive and even ludicrous in its regressive stupidity, and she would have laughed scornfully at it if she could just have remembered any other ways of doing it…

_Okay, but let's take a look at that,_ she thought. _Primitive, eh? What do I mean by that? What's primitive?_

_Well, it's doing things one way when there's a more…_

… _effective/simple/refined/intelligent/work-saving…_

… _way of doing it. Like, uh…_

She struggled.

… _like killing a prey by throwing rocks in it instead of using a bow and arrow. Yes, that's it. Throwing rocks at things is _primitive…

That thought gave her an enormous amount of satisfaction. It divided the world into the primitive people, who threw rocks, and non-primitive people, who shot arrows, and placed Catherine herself firmly into the right category.

A further inspection of her own ingrained attitude revealed that Rick, Deborah, Harold and Mel were all primitive. She couldn't exactly explain why that was so, but she knew in her heart that they had to be primitive, or else they would never have dragged her…

… somewhere…

… away from, er, somewhere else that was nicer…

… aw, _fuck_.

Catherine scowled. There was no _context_ to anything! Maybe she really had gone mad.

"So I figure once we've eaten, we'll do a ritual to Gull'shush," Harold said. "We've put it off way too long, he's going to get ticked off soon."

"Gull'shush?" Mel was sitting outside of a tent, massaging his bare feet. "Who's that again?"

Harold gave him an annoyed glance.

"Gull'shush?" he said. "You know, our god? Whom we worship? We sacrifice to him, he hands us plenty of prey and good weather?"

"He's really been very patient with us lately," Deborah said. "It must have been a turn of the moon since we sacrificed anything to him, but look at the nice caribou he sent us."

Catherine looked at the animal Harold was skinning.

"_It was a deer two minutes ago_!" she howled. "Am I crazy, or is it the whole world?"

As a response, there was a long, high-pitched wail that seemed to originate somewhere right behind her… as in, from the heavy load on her back.

Catherine did the math. She couldn't exactly remember what math was, but she did it anyway.

"Oh shit," she said very quietly.

"Now you've woken the baby," Deborah said with gentle rebuke.

With wide-eyed horror, Catherine took the pack from her back. It was a sort of wicker basket, like the one she had been carrying. Only instead of berries, it contained a red-faced, screaming, naked infant.

_Mine?_ Catherine thought dumbly. The kid did have blue eyes, like hers, but a lot of people had blue eyes. The brat could have been anyone's… except the situation did sort of strongly imply that she was Catherine's.

"No, no, no," Catherine groaned. "This isn't right, if I had a kid this age, my breasts should be all swollen and… aoch."

The sudden pain wasn't that bad, really. It wasn't the kind that made you scream and whimper. It was the kind that added yet another hassle to your everyday life, the kind you forgot about for long periods of time and just noticed when you thought about it. Catherine looked down. And had to admit she didn't exactly mind what she saw.

_Hey, I bet I could fill out a bikini right now. Cool._

She shook her head. No, wait, stop, think this through. Who was the father supposed to be, for one thing? Harold and Deborah were an item, Rick was her brother, which left…

She looked with horror at Mel, who was scratched his head and mumbling to himself.

"No," she said. "Just… no."

"Well, hand him over," Deborah said and held out her hands. She had gotten a fire started, and Rick was sitting down to feed more twigs to it to keep it going. "It was sweet of you to carry him, dear, my back gets so tired sometimes…"

Catherine handed over the child with some relief. Right, so the kid was Deborah's and Harold's, and Catherine had been carrying her as a favour to Deborah, and she had just imagined that she was lactating – yes, a look revealed that the girls were back to being slight bumps on her chest; oh, well, easy come, easy go – and things were generally as they were supposed to be.

Except they weren't. And she hadn't imagined a thing. This was all wrong. It was stupid. It was _wrong_.

"It's like my life's written by some hack writer who can't keep things straight in his head and isn't allowed to go back and change his mistakes once he's made them," she said out loud.

"What's a writer?" Rick said.

Catherine groaned and covered her face in her hands. She wished she knew.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18 (continued):_

_While Hunters don't usually live long enough to breed, a lot of them have small children at the time of their Imbuing. I wonder if there's any hunter-net articles entitled, say, "How to balance raising children and saving the world"? Probably._

_Still, it raises a significant (though not entirely original, I admit) question. If the Heralds wanted soldiers, monster-slayers extraordinaire, wouldn't they just Imbue marines and SWAT officers and so forth – preferably ones with no real attachments that could interfere with their Imbued duties? Okay, so the Heralds obviously don't want only monster-killers – even the Hunters who claim that the only right thing to do is wipe out every Anomaly in existence admit that a great many Edges seem custom-made to provide other benefits than outright killing – but even so, the Imbuing doesn't just come to people who are in a good situation to meet its demands. It seems to come to anyone, without playing favourites in any way._

_The Heralds seem to be completely non-judgemental as far as lifestyles go, even to the point of sacrificing efficiency. There seems to be absolutely no one who's not a candidate for being Imbued, no matter their personality, life situation or abilities. It's like the Heralds are in favour of people, and believe that there is inherent nobility in every single living person – as long as he's not been tainted by the Anomalies in some way._

_That's all very enlightened and all, but sometimes I must question their wisdom in selecting…_

---

Catherine sat staring listlessly into the eddies of the brook. No one seemed to want anything from her at the moment, which suited her fine. She kept feeling like there was something escaping her, something just out of her grasp.

_Maybe this is a dream,_ she thought. That idea was probably the most sensible one she had come up with so far. _It'd make sense. In dreams, you often can't remember something very important, so you just walk around feeling generally uncomfortable about it. In dreams, things change into other things at the drop of a hat, and you're the only one who doesn't treat it as perfectly normal._

She dipped a toe in the water. It was freezing cold and sent shivers up her leg. And that didn't fit. You could feel things, in dreams, but they generally weren't as intense as all that. And in addition to things turning into other things, time itself usually kept on slipping. You never sat around being bored in dreams. You just fast-forwarded to the next interesting thing that happened.

Right now, she was confused, miserable, and, yes, _bored_. In fact, she could feel herself dozing off. Falling asleep in a dream? At the very least that ought to send her into a more interesting one…

With heavy eyelids, she noted sleepily that the whirls and eddies in the brook were curving in weird ways. That one over there formed almost a full circle, like an O… and there right next to it was an even stranger one, like a P… in fact, the brook was spelling out words, and it struck Catherine as very strange that she had never before realised that brooks had writing on them…

OPEN YOUR EYES.

Catherine flinched and snapped wide awake. The eddies were just eddies again, and very unlike letters.

_The Heralds!_

Catherine felt herself quiver in her whole body. She had forgotten the Heralds, just like everything else. She still couldn't exactly remember where and how she had learned about them, only that they sent her visions about…

_Anomalies,_ a voice deep inside her whispered, but she didn't know the meaning of the word.

… about bad things. Whatever madness she had fallen into, they had reached into it and told her, in no uncertain terms, to snap out of it. The only problem was, she didn't know how.

_Help me!_ she thought. _Give me some _real _instructions for a change! I know this is all wrong, but I don't know how to get out of it!_

But the Heralds never did any such thing. Maybe they couldn't. If all they were were voices from Catherine's own overheated subconscious, then cryptic remarks were all they were capable of – heck, it was remarkable enough that the vague, suppressed feelings could be turned into verbal prophesies in the first place. But either way, the Heralds were… trustworthy… as far as they went.

"You can tell, too, can't you?" Mel said, coming up behind her.

"That this is all messed up?" Catherine said, not turning her head. "Yes, I can tell. No, I have no idea why or how."

"The others haven't noticed a thing." Mel crouched down by her side. "I've tried pointing out a few things to them that doesn't make sense, but…"

"But the moment you point them out, they change so that they _do_ make sense, at least as far as you can tell, and once they've changed they've been that way all the time, at least as far as anyone else is concerned?" Catherine said.

"Yeah," Mel said. "Like that."

"Mmm." Catherine sighed. "That technically means that if we can point out why _none_ of this makes any sense, it'll _all_ go away and we'll go back to reality… whatever that is."

"Yeah, but the world keeps adapting itself so that it gets rid of things that obviously doesn't make sense and replaces them with things that you feel in your gut doesn't make sense, but which you can't actually _prove_ are impossible," Mel said.

"Kind of like arguing with a Christian," Catherine said.

"What's a Christian?"

"Beats me. Someone who's very good at not making sense, I guess."

"Hey, that's…" Mel blinked.

"What?"

"Nothing, I just…" Mel shrugged uncomfortably. "I thought I remembered something for a moment there." He shook his head. "Anyway, the reason I came over here was to tell you that Harold is ready for his big ritual thing."

"Oh, woop-dee-do." Catherine winced. "And do we know who this Gull'shush person is yet?"

"Nope," Mel said. "Except that he runs the universe, apparently. Or at least the local neighbourhood."

"Making him the one who's doing this to us, right?" Catherine said.

"I guess." Mel rose back up. "Think if we ask him nicely he'll let us go?"

"We might have more luck smacking him," Catherine grumbled, but got to her feet as well.

Harold was holding court in the camp, having decked himself up in a mouldy mountain lion pelt and painted his face and flabby torso with some red substance – caribou blood, Catherine supposed. He was prancing around in front of Deborah and Rick, making sweeping gestures and chanting what Catherine was fairly sure was completely nonsense.

The sun went down, sending the forest into utter blackness, broken only by the light of the campfire.

_Hey, wait… you don't usually go from day to night in two seconds flat…_

"He comes!" Harold intoned. "He comes! He comes! The great Gull'shush comes!"

Deborah gave off the kind of self-conscious scream given off by people who approach life by fussing over it until every problem disintegrated with exhaustion, when encountering something big and scary and unpleasant. It was a scream that said that the screamer was very sorry to be making all this commotion, but golly, wasn't this _dreadful_? Catherine's absolute disgust for Deborah was raised another notch.

"He comes!" Harold cried. "Oh mighty Gull'shush, accept our meagre offering!"

"Wait." Catherine looked around to see if any sacrificial gifts were in evidence. They were not. "What are we sacrificing, exactly?"

"Why, ourselves, silly." Deborah smiled shakily. "We give of our own number, and the great Gull'shush gifts the tribe with his infinite grace."

"I knew it'd be something like that!" Catherine growled. She took a step forward. "Harold, shut your mouth this minute or I'll ram a spear in your gut!"

"No…" Mel shook his head. "This isn't how it works… You're supposed to be _ready_ to die for the lord, yes, but he never _actually_…"

"Deborah," Harold said, beckoning his wife closer. The air had suddenly grown very cold, and the wind was wailing through the trees.

"No!" Catherine grabbed Deborah's thick wrist. "Stop this!"

"It's all right, dear," Deborah said. The smile she gave Catherine looked like a skull's grin. "It's all part of womanhood. We give of ourselves, so that our boys may life."

"Like hell!" Catherine screamed. The wind was picking up. Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of roots being torn free of soil, of great trees plummeting to the ground.

"This isn't the way it _goes_!" Mel screamed. "This is _never_ the way it goes!"

"It's no use!" Harold snapped. "He's here!"

And he was.

He appeared out of the darkness, a huge, thick-limped, four-legged being as black as the forest night. His eyes shone with pain and misery and tired righteous anger. He moved in an unsteady lumbering, like a tremendously strong creature that was nevertheless on the verge of being overcome with fatigue or wounds.

"Accept this sacrifice, mighty Gull'shush!" Harold cried. "And forgive us our negligence towards you, the giver of all things!"

Deborah was tugging at Catherine's grip, but Catherine resisted with every muscle in her skinny body. It was an uneven struggle – Deborah was heavier, and despite her portly form, she had some muscles under there. Catherine, who never carried anything heavier than a notebook, felt her grip slipping.

"No… please… you don't understand, I really do _have_ to…" Deborah insisted.

"This…" Mel was gasping like he had run a mile. "This – is – not – the…"

A thundering voice suddenly boomed over the wind. While it was loud, it didn't simply overpower all the other noises. It was more like their volume had been lowered to a fragment of its usual self for the duration of the voice's words.

ON THAT OTHER MAY LIVE!

A fierce white light erupted from Mel, competing with the red, flickering glow of the fire. There was nothing very comforting about the light. It was sharp and bright and unpleasant to the eye, but it chased the darkness away with an offhanded ease that resembled disgust.

"No, you damn well don't!" Mel roared and threw himself at Gull'shush. He grappled with the gargantuan creature, and though it seemed like he should have been crushed like a bug, he lifted the monster in his grip and slammed it into the ground.

"No! You can't!" Harold wailed. "_My_ monster! _My _fight! _My _god! You're not supposed to touch what's _mine_!"

Catherine hit him over the head with a spear. Harold dropped to his knees with a surprised holler.

Gull'shush tried to get back on its paws, but Mel, still shining with that merciless light, met it with a two-handed punch that struck into its monstrous face and made it recoil down towards the dirt again.

Then the light intensified until it seemed to Catherine that it must be shining straight through her, filling her with its furious radiance – and then the light was everything, and she was in the light, and the entire world was forgotten for a time.

---

_The journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 18 (concluded):_

_Let's rap this up, before I really get lost in my own rhetoric._

_Why do people like forests? Beats me. What is there to like? About the only possible reason that I can really relate to is that forests don't have a lot of people in them, and people frequently get really, really sick of one another. But forests, in their way, makes as many demands, as many assumptions, as many infringements on your right to be yourself, as other people do._

_We built cities to get away from nature, and then promptly started yearning to go back. Where's the sense in that?_

_Why do we feel guilty about polluting nature? Not just guilty in the style of 'I cheated on my diet,' which is to say, guilty that we have done something that feels good in the short term but which will come back to haunt us in the long term. Actually guilty in the style of 'I have committed murder.' How can you have a moral duty to something that is utterly devoid of moral? What shame is there in screwing something that would happily screw you given half a chance?_

_This shame in doing something that should be morally neutral, this longing for something we have no sensible reason to long for… is it ours? Or has someone inflicted it on us?_

---

Catherine was awakened by birds singing. She was lying in her tent, feeling remarkably rested despite the lumpy ground beneath her sleeping bag. Most of her body ached, though. She groaned to herself as she remembered yesterday. Just typical of that ass Harold to suggest a short cut that got them nowhere so that they had to spent all day finding their way back here again…

_No. Stop. That's your mind trying to rewrite your memories into something that makes sense. But you're a Hunter. You don't have to take that. Remember it as it _actually _was._

She groaned again, louder this time. This Anomaly had really messed her up, hadn't it? It had thrown her back into the Stone Age, robbed her of everything she needed to fight it. She had _never_ been made that helpless before, _never_ faced an Anomaly that could unmake her with a wave of its paw.

But – woop dee do! – she was wearing jeans and a blouse again, and the tent she was lying in was made of cloth, not hide. She was back. She was safe… okay, maybe that was going too far, but still…

_Mel. Mel saved us. He fought the Anomaly._ She marvelled at the recollection. _Mel's a Hunter…_

She crawled out of the tent. The others were all accounted for. Rick, Harold and Deborah were breaking camp. Mel, in some kind of imitation of herself yesterday, was sitting by the shore and staring down into the brook. Catherine mumbled a half-hearted 'good morning' to the others and went to sit down next to him.

His eyes were staring blindly into the distance, and his mouth hung down in slack disbelief. Catherine found his overwhelmed state a lot more appealing than his usual easy-going sleaziness, but she could sort of sympathise, too. She knew the feeling.

"They can't remember a thing, can they?" Catherine said.

"Doesn't seem like it," Mel said distantly. "I mean, I don't think I can just go up to them and say, 'hey, fellas, do you by any chance remember how we were all cavemen yesterday?'"

"Welcome to life as a Hunter," Catherine said.

"It's not usually like this, honest," Mel said with a measure of wryness.

There was a moment of silence.

"That was supposed to be a cryptic statement prompting you to ask what I meant, so I could explain," Catherine said accusingly. "Doesn't anyone understand a queue anymore?"

"What?" Mel blinked. "You just said something about hunting trips."

"No, I said…" Catherine sighed. "Damn unimaginative labels. I said _Hunter_, with a capital H. Also known as chosen one, champion, slayer of evil, and all sorts of things like that, depending on who's doing the talking."

"You mean there are others?" Mel stared at Catherine. "I mean, yes, I suppose there'd have to be. I, I, I wouldn't presume…" His eyes widened. "_You_…"

"Me." Catherine grinned mirthlessly.

"_You_ have had…" He shook his head. "I'm still trying to figure out what happened yesterday. It was some kind of black magic, wasn't it? And God stepped in and gave one of us the power to fight back." He paused. "Me," he said, amazed. "He chose as his instrument. Why? I'm a sinner. I'm not worthy."

He went silent for a second, then threw his head back and laughed hysterically.

"You know, that's such a cliché," he said. "But when something like this actually happens to you, it really _is_ the first thing that comes to mind, isn't it?"

"Wasn't for me," Catherine said. "And be careful with the 'God' thing. Everyone's got their own theory. We refer to that… presence… that talks to us and gives us power as 'the Heralds,' just to avoid stepping on each other's toes."

"But it fits!" Mel insisted. "See the Devil try to snare the innocents… well, the semi-innocents, at least. See God step in and kick the Devil's infernal ass. And that _voice_ – tell me it didn't sound to you like the word of God!"

"Dunno. Never heard the word of God," Catherine said. "That was the Heralds. And before you get all worked up about how wonderful it all is, here's some information for you. You've just joined an exclusive club of suicidal do-gooders. We fight this war in a thousand different ways, for a thousand different reasons, but one thing is the same for all of us. We _die_, Mel. We make it a couple of months, or maybe a year or two, but sooner or later, our luck runs out, and we die. And then the Heralds Imbue someone else to take our place, and the world moves on without us."

"I don't care," Mel said earnestly. "I've done so much wrong in my life. From now on, I'll do what's right, even if I have to die a thousand times over."

Catherine gaped. Something had just clicked into place.

"Son of a bitch…" she whispered.

"Sorry? I just meant…"

"Not you." Catherine got up with a jerk. "The effing Anomaly who's been harassing us all this time! I know what it's doing! It won last night! You kicked its ass, beat it to a bloody pulp, sent it off with its tail between its legs, and it _won_!"

---

_Idiot, moron, numbskull, fool, buffoon, simpleton, twit, bonehead…_

Catherine rummaged through her pack. She was aware of the others staring at her, but she didn't care. She was furious with herself for being so stupid, and she was even more furious with the Anomaly for putting one over her the way it had.

_Oh yes, you did fine, you bastard. You got me walking around thinking I didn't have a clue. I was on _your _turf, wasn't I? I had to let idiots like my brother and his friends guide me, lead the way even though I _knew _that they weren't equipped to get us out of this. You got me to stop _thinking_, you asshole! You made me feel so intimidated and out of my element that I just drifted along, let you set up the rules…_

She pulled her long, black coat out of the pack, unfolded it with relish. Then she shrugged out of her bright orange jacket and threw it as far into the forest as her strength allowed. She put the coat on, letting it unfurl around her like a pair of black wings. It felt wonderful. It felt like becoming herself again.

_Well, let me tell you something, Gull'shush, or whatever the hell you're name is. I'm Catherine Marianne Faller MD, and I'm _never _out of my element! You can take me out of the city, but you can't take the city out of me, and guess what, pal? The city's coming for your ass!_

"Mel, you're coming with me," she said. "The rest of you, stay put. Rick, don't let any of them leave." She glared at Harold. "Especially don't let _him_ leave."

"Cathy, what…?" Rick said helplessly.

"What's going on?" Deborah said shrilly. "I don't understand."

Catherine gave her a contemptuous glance.

"No," she said, "you don't. You're the only one here who doesn't know even _part_ of the truth, you poor bitch. Our only real innocent. But you're an effing moron for all that, and I despise you from the bottom of my unfeminine heart. Mel, come on."

She strode off into the woods. She thought she could recall the way well enough; it had been reasonably light out when she and Harold had walked back to camp last morning.

"So I don't suppose this is all some pretext to get me alone so you can molest me?" Mel said with nervous cheer as he tagged along after her.

"Lose the rifle," Catherine said tonelessly. "It won't help. In fact, it'll probably hurt."

Mel carefully took the bullets out of the rifle and put it down on a rock.

"You've got a plan, right?" he said.

"No," Catherine said. "But I know what's going on. That's going to give me a chance to improvise, at least."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"We get brutally massacred and our corpses are eaten by crows."

"Oh," Mel said.

"So how are you enjoying being a Hunter so far?"

It only took them half an hour or so to reach the clearing where Harold had fought the Anomaly. A huge creature was lying still in the middle of it, its neck clearly broken. It looked like a great, black bear – rare, but in no way supernatural, except to Catherine. Her every nerve screamed about how _wrong_ the dead beast was.

"I killed it," Mel said. "Though I don't know how it got all the way here before…"

"Don't be fooled," Catherine said. "I doubt this thing _can_ die." She kicked the black, furry back. "Hey! Rise and shine, oh mighty Gull'shush. Your devoted worshippers are here to praise you."

Huge black eyes opened. A head that was suddenly no longer balanced on a broken neck turned to regard her.

"I still don't know what you are," Catherine said. "But I think I know what your game is. Harold was right, wasn't he? _Kind_ of right. A yearly battle, the champion of civilisation against the champion of the wild… except the stakes weren't what he thought, were they? If he ever lost, civilisation wouldn't have crumbled to dust. You'd have gnawed on his bones, perhaps, but other than that, things would have gone on the same way as always. But that could never happen anyway. You were the one who picked him to represent humanity – an overweight accountant who likes to get out here once a year and play Davey Crocket. That says something about how you see us, doesn't it?"

The Anomaly watched her passively.

"You took a dive, every time," Catherine said. "For what, though? I guess you're not going to tell me, but this looks kind of deep and metaphorical to me. And you have 'martyr' written all over you. You're supposed to represent noble nature, being victimised by the mean, evil human, aren't you? And when you lose… does it set off some kind of telepathic shock wave? Force the idea of 'nature pristine and tormented, man decadent and abusive' into the minds of every human being in the state? In the country? Stop me if I get it right?"

The Anomaly made no attempt to stop her.

"But this time I interfered," Catherine went on. "Made the big fight stop in a draw. No fuel for your little mind-whammy that way. So you went a bit more extreme. Put us in some kind of shared hallucination – a scenario that would end in Harold sacrificing his wife to you. I guess that works as a metaphor too. Callous Man, city-builder and self-proclaimed shaman, sacrificing selfless Woman, nurturer and bringer of life, for his own petty ends. And both Harold and Deborah were _really_ easy to get to play their parts, weren't they?"

The Anomaly showed its teeth, snarling soundlessly.

"That didn't work out," Catherine said, "but the Heralds interfered and handed our boy here the power to push you back. Except that was okay too, wasn't it? The Heralds are bastards sometimes, but they're very pro-human. So you got your fight, human against nature, and you got your mind-whammy fuel. It all worked out for you in the end."

Though the snarl didn't change, to Catherine it started looking more and more like a smug little sneer.

"Well, you win this round," she said. "But next year, I'll be watching Harold like a hawk. I won't let him come to your big match. And if you try to find some other champion of the human race, I'll find him and stop him too. I don't think I could do that now, but in one year, there's no telling what I'll be able to do. My powers keep growing. Yours, I think, are static. That's the way your kind likes the world, isn't it? Static? Always the same." She smirked. "Humans rule the world because we're _not_. Suck on _that_ for a year, you old bastard. Your fun is officially over. And won't it be interesting to see what happens once your emissions stop coming? How that change the way people think?"

Without a moment's warning, the Anomaly threw itself at her, but Catherine was prepared.

"_No_!" she snapped, pushing her voice into the Anomaly's alien brain, stopping it in its tracks.

Mel ran at the Anomaly, ready to wrestle it like last time – not surprisingly, he hadn't understood a word she had said – but she threw up an arm in his path, holding him back.

The Anomaly struck again and again, huge jaws and mighty clawed paws lunging for her. Again and again Catherine Denied the attack, made the Anomaly turn away at the last moment. Again. And again.

---

They could have remained that way forever, the woman and the beast, endlessly attacking and endlessly being held off, but ancient creature – which had indeed been called Gull'shush, the Sufferer of All Ills, as well as a thousand other names in a hundred other tongues throughout its long, strange life – was only as strong as the energy it managed to raise through its yearly ritual, through the rite it thought of as the Singing of All Crimes, and this year, it had weakened itself mightily. It no longer had hundred of shamans praising its name; they had gone out of time and mind, along with the world to which the creature had been born. It was no longer a simple task for it to conjure up worlds of dream for its enemies to lose themselves in.

The woman, however, this persistent and endlessly interfering woman, was drawing her power from a well that was nigh on infinite. If she hadn't been so hopelessly inapt at wielding it, if her tiny human mind had been capable of grasping the simplest mechanism of the powers granted to her, she could have dissolved the Sufferer of All Ills, eradicated it from existence. As it was, her tiny fragment of understanding and control was sufficient to allow her to go on using it until the end of days; of rebuffing any number of assaults and still remain standing there, filled with that hateful, merciless light.

So in the end, the Sufferer of All Ills was, for the second time during this unsettling couple of days, forced to do something that had once been unthinkable. It turned and fled.

---

When the Anomaly had disappeared among the trees, Catherine finally allowed herself to sink to her knees, trembling. Once or twice, she had felt her control slipping, had felt the Denial _almost_ failing to keep the creature's claws from tearing off her face.

"And now what?" Mel said. "Do we hunt it down?"

Catherine shook her head.

"We can't kill it," she said. "Killing it just makes it stronger. Being killed by humans is what that thing is all _about_, don't you understand?"

"Nope," Mel said.

"Didn't think you did," Catherine grumbled.

"So what _do_ we do?" Mel said, apparently unaffected by the tired sarcasm.

"We go home." Catherine got back to her feet. She felt tired, emotionally drained, but also strangely confident. The flesh might be weak, but her intellect and her Edges were in fine condition.

"But then… what was this all about?" Mel said. "Why did you want to go here and fight it?"

"To shake it up." Catherine sighed and started walking back towards the camp. "To show it that it won't always be able to catch people in that double bind it's so fond of – 'if I win, I win; if you win, I die, and then I win anyway.' To show it that sometimes, people will find a third solution."

"It was all for a philosophical victory?" Mel said incredulously, following her.

"Yes… but if I was right, it was a philosophical entity," Catherine said. "Maybe that sort of thing means something, in that case. Or not. I don't know."

"Huh… well, what about everything you said about being back next year?" Mel said. "Didn't you say that Hunters don't usually last that long?"

"_It_ didn't know that," Catherine said. "Besides, I'm stubborn. Maybe I'll actually be alive a year from now." She winced. "Unlikely as it seems."

"There's that." Mel suddenly grinned. "Hey, if we're on borrowed time anyway, shouldn't we be making the most of the time we…"

"I have a knife up my sleeve," Catherine said flatly. "Do you want to live your borrowed time as a eunuch?"

Mel considered that.

"I'll be good," he said humbly.


End file.
